'Running around the trees'

Indian film usually includes scenes where the hero and heroineburst into song, in fantastic locales far removed from the actual setting of the story, often with multiple costume changes and scores of dancers in the background.

Derided by the press as "running around the trees," these song sequences are perhaps the most defining and distinctive feature of popular cinema in India, said Teja Ganti, Minority Scholar in Residence at the Center for Visual Culture, in a November 14 lecture on the social and visual world of Hindi film music.

Most Indian scholars and intellectuals dismiss popular cinema as formulaic and escapist, citing the song sequences as primary evidence, Ganti said. "There is also a sense in Indian scholarship that film music, due to its hybrid and syncretic nature that assimilates influences from all over the world, is not authentically Indian, although many songs are directly based on folk tunes or classical melodies."

Music and song have been woven into Indian culture and daily life over thousands of years, she explained, and in Indian cinema, unlike Western, they shape and move the narrative. Song sequences are used, for example, to show the passage of time, evoke memories, and express intense emotion, "eliminating the need for verbalization and creating a mood that cues the viewer in to the character's state of mind," Ganti said. The most common emotion expressed musically in Hindi films is love, and where a love story is not the main focus of the plot, a romantic track is developed.

A standard sequence with hero and heroine singing and dancing in the rain indicates the intensification of love. "These often highly erotic sequences with wet clothes clinging to bodies, especially the heroine's, are part of the elaborate system of allusions to rather than explicit portrayals of sexuality and physical intimacy in Hindi films," Ganti said.

India produces the most feature films in the world, 600-900 annually, and approximately five billion theater tickets are sold yearly. The cinema is exhaustively discussed by the press, broadcast media, the state and viewers. Film music accounts for nearly 80 percent of music sales, and Indian television is packed with film-based programming.

Ganti focuses her research on everyday life and production ideologies of the Bombay film industry, dubbed "Bollywood," which produces Hindi films. "Indian feature films are produced in 20 languages; only about 20 percent of the total are in Hindi, but they are the ones that circulate nationally and internationally and dominate the discourse about Indian cinema," she said.

Ganti noted that while song sequences are seen as "a sign of backwardness, the industry's inability to rid itself of older narrative traditions and the demands of mass undiscriminating audience, they are also seen as a sign of modernity in terms of visual, aural and economic mastery." Film-makers' search for "exotic" locales have led them to sites around the world, including its "seven wonders," and even last July to Haverford's Duck Pond and Bryn Mawr's Goodhart Hall!